The drainage water chute beneath Blast Furnace Number Four was never built for human passage. It was an oval sewer of glass-fused red brick, four feet high and three feet wide, designed fifty years earlier to carry acidic melted rock waste runoff and boiler washings from the lower fire pits into the Black Sluice canal.
Tomas Reed crawled on his hands and knees through eight inches of freezing, rotten-egg mud. The sludge was thick as wet mortar. It smelled sickeningly of decomposed coal tar, rancid machine animal fat, and raw sewage. Every foot of progress was a brutal physical trial. His knees sank into the gritty settled mud, grinding fine specks of quartz and fire melted rock waste through the worn wool of his work trousers.
Behind him, Renn Tal was moving with painful slowness. The old engineer’s breath came in ragged, wheezing gasps that sounded like a cracked bellows. Freezing sickness was setting in. Tal’s woolen coat was soaked through with scalding water drops from the blowout and now chilled by the freezing groundwater that seeped continuously through the cracked brick vaulting.
“Keep moving, Tal,” Tomas said quietly, pausing every four yards to look back over his shoulder. “Don’t rest your chest in the muck. Follow my lantern mark.”
